Victron Smart Shunt

Just curious if anyone has any experience with this product? Looking to add it to a 36v lithium upgrade for trolling motor batteries next year. Thanks

Ty Kennedy wrote:

Just curious if anyone has any experience with this product? Looking to add it to a 36v lithium upgrade for trolling motor batteries next year. Thanks

I have one as part of my cabin solar. Never thought to use it for trolling motor batteries but I guess you could use it for anything. Do you just want to see the state of charge? The settings are pretty finicky in regards to when it resets to 100% but Im thinking it wouldn’t be a problem in a boat where you know you are actually fully charging when you plug it in. In my setup it resets early and I’m still adjusting it to match the charger more accurately.

Yeah just wondering if it would be beneficial for the set up to see how the batteries are charging and how much juice I go thru in a day. It’s just so difficult to find real world info on this stuff that’s not from a company website.

Ty Kennedy wrote:

Yeah just wondering if it would be beneficial for the set up to see how the batteries are charging and how much juice I go thru in a day. It’s just so difficult to find real world info on this stuff that’s not from a company website.

From what I researched I think it’s one of the most accurate ones you can get. The “finicky” part is because to be accurate there are a lot of variables to adjust for. I still don’t think I have mine dialed in quite right for the “state of charge” percentage (where a lot of variables come into play) but it also just shows “Consumed AH” and that is just plain power that’s passed through the shunt so it should be pretty accurate.

The weirdness with charging comes from how you configure it to reset to 100% / 0AH consumed. There are so many variables there that you might have it reset early but it probably won’t matter for a trolling motor where you only discharge during use and then plug it in and only charge until it’s full. It’s an issue for my solar because it’s always doing both.

You can turn off the reset/synchronization too but I don’t think it will ever stay accurate that way because of all the variables mentioned. For example, 10AH goes out in one direction and 10AH comes in the other direction… you aren’t actually at 0AH consumed because it’s not 100% efficient.

Lots of info and fairly accurate is what I’m looking for even tho I probably won’t have much idea what I’m looking at right away so thank you for the information

Some good batteries with the Bluetooth monitoring built in that are not much more than the ones without. Or even less if you go with a weize or chinz. I have ionics. Had bad power on a fishing trip. Only enough juice to run 2 of 4 banks on my charger. Knowing they weren’t all charging I was able to switch to a different outlet and not ruin my next day of fishing. Not sure what size of boat you have or batteries you are looking at but most information on the internet pertains to bass boats. Lots of talk about 50ah for 36v. Deep v walleye boats take a lot more juice. I’ve run my 3 12v 100ah batteries under 10% fishing on the river in heavy current with 21′ fiberglass boat.

Running a 21 foot aluminum Lund and I went with the 135 amp hour dakotas for it. I was kicking around the ionics with the monitoring built right into them. I don’t think I’d be able to kill them in a day but stranger things have happened.